Facebook Outage Slowed 1000s Of Retail, Content Sites

As you may have read by now, Facebook‘s Web site last night slowed down – or was entirely inaccessible – to a large number of users. Data suggests the site suffered sporadic outages for about three hours, from 11 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday until about 2 a.m. on Friday.

What’s been less reported is that Facebook‘s pain was felt by many other sites with interconnections to Facebook.

Steven Tack, chief technology for Compuware’s APM Solutions business, which provides application performance measurement tools to thousands of Web sites, says his company’s data shows that the Facebook outage had widespread ripple effects, slowing the performance of many of the Web’s most highly trafficked news and retail sites.

The culprit: the rapid spread of the Like button.

Tack notes that most Web sites actually contain elements from many domains – generally at least 10, and sometimes as many as 20 or 30. The material from those additional domains include all kinds of things – shopping carts, Web analytics, ad networks and content or applications from other sites. In the case of the Like button, the code that generates its appearance on many sites actually sits on Facebook’s servers. Page load times are affected by all relevant elements. So when Facebook sneezed last night, the Web caught a cold. Read More